A Son of the Rock

Penguin, 2014, 119 p. Translated from the Spanish Memoria de mis putas tristes (Mondadori, Barcelona, 2005) by Edith Grossman

The title strongly suggests this (short) novel will address at least two of literature’s big three themes. Sex certainly and, if not death, then at least old age. And it does so from the first sentence, where our narrator reveals that the year he turned ninety he, “wanted to give himself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” A columnist on a Colombian newspaper, this is a man who has always paid for the women he has had sex with – even if they threw the money on the floor straight away.

He contacts his madam of choice, Rosa Cabarcas, to arrange the contract. In the event, though, when he enters the room the child is sleeping and he does nothing to disturb her. Instead he begins to idolise her and reminisce about his past life.

That title is slightly misleading, there is not actually much about whores in the 119 pages, whether melancholy or otherwise. What there is, are the ruminations of an old man on life, love and obsession, thus hitting squarely on literature’s third big theme. Of women he says, “they know the how and the why when they want to,” and of ageing as a man, “among the charms of old age are the provocations our young female friends permit themselves because they think we are out of commission.” There is also some wit. The state censor at the newspaper, altogether too fond of striking his pen through the whole of a piece of copy, is dubbed the Abominable No-Man.

It is definitely the work of a writer who knew thoroughly what he was doing and how to achieve his ends but also with the sly urge to provoke.

Pedant’s corner:- “the incipient down on her pubis” (the pubis is the pubic bone, not the genital area. The external prominence is the Mons pubis.) “The best part of her body were her large, silent stepping feet” (the best part was,) Praxiteles’ (Praxiteles’s,) Heraclitus’ (Heraclitus’s.)